Hellboy's Kroenen: Psychometry
by linaerys
Summary: In Professor Broom's lab Kroenen remembers his childhood. Warnings for cruelty to animals and children. An origin story.


**Title:** Psychometry  
**Author:** My Kroenen Fansite  
Rating: PG-13 for cruelty to animals and murder  
**Summary:** In Broom's lab, Kroenen remembers his childhood. I got an idea last night of why Kroenen started to wear the mask without all that "air of hell" crap. This does not necessarily fit into the framework of my other Kroenen fic.  
**Feedback:** Pretty please! I can never get enough feedback!  
  
**Psychometry**   
  
Skin, everywhere skin, touching things; some of his skin touched new things where it had touched nothing new in sixty years. Kroenen shuddered and came back to life against the chill touch of the metal bench. (_A frog creature breathed its last painful, air-dried breath_.) Even if those fools had not taken the painfully obvious step of bringing him to their headquarters, Kroenen would know where he was. Every touch of cloth and metal gave him flashes of others' lives. Many had breathed their last on this bench, their lives forfeit to fiendish science as surely as those in his own laboratory.   
  
For so long he had protected himself from the intrusive touch of the dead things that made up the world. So long . . . he had grown unaccustomed to the press of thoughts that accompanied every touch of his skin on foreign objects. The Ogdru Jahad could take his life, his blood, his eyelids, but they could not take the taint at his very core and the virus of his skin.   
  
He sat up, and felt the towel slide off his waist (_dying cells of a dying man--Professor Broom's hands touched it last_) and reached toward his mechanical hand (_an immortal fish-thing with thoughts like water_). Though air no longer mattered to him, the reflexes of the living still held their power, and he breathed hard with dead lungs that drew no sustenance from the air.   
  
So many sensations, so many unwelcome thoughts. He took refuge the only way he could--in a swamp of memories that drew him down away from this horrid, naked place.   
  
[][][]   
  
Karl could not remember when this talent had not preyed upon his sanity. His earliest memory was of the horror of stealing a piece of food and feeling the death agonies (_a blinding gout of blood, a panicked stagger_) of the pig whose life and gone for this link of sausage. Psychometry, it was called--it was not undocumented even in the local library, and he learned to read very young--some quirk of neurons that told him everything about whoever had previously possessed an object.   
  
He had a tantrum that day, and earned his father's harsh scolding--a switch when he was young, a rod when he was older. Nothing remarkable in being beaten; most of his classmates were, and Karl had been often enough before, but usually for reasons he could understand.   
  
In a rare moment of empathy his father asked: "Why were you screaming, Karl?" He was young, but knew even then that the full truth would only earn him more pain.   
  
"I was scared," he mumbled.   
  
"You must learn to face your fears," said his father. "See this?" His father pointed to the long scar marring one cheek from temple to chin, a deep fissure of red--a dueling scar. "This shows that I've faced my fears. Someday you will have to show that, too."   
  
The visions came to Karl unpredictably, and only when he touched things with his hands, never anywhere else. They were always debilitating in their sudden intrusion into his ordinary reality. The visions would stop him silent when he stood in class to recite an answer, or in the middle of bringing in firewood. He begged with his mother for gloves and wore those every moment he could, and even though his classmates laughed, their torments always lacked spirit after the first time.   
  
A boy tried to take his gloves. When Karl got them back he knew from their touch who had done it, and tripped him down the stairs. It was an unlucky fall, and the boy broke his leg. Karl stood over him before anyone else came, and leaned down as if to help. Then he bared his hand and squeezed where the bone came through. "This hurts," he said, calmly. No one tried to steal from him after that.   
  
When he was ten his arms became afflicted, followed by his face, his back, all his skin. He could touch nothing without a constant barrage of images. A hug from his mother (_the laundress tounged her canker sore as she worked_), a school book (_the teachers' dim contempt for his students, and ill-concealed lust for one of his fellows_), but it was dead things that held the most horror for him--in the touch of a fur coat he could feel a ermine hundred lives torn away in fear.   
  
Karl hid these intrusions as best he could, but not well enough. One day his father noticed him shaking as he tried to eat dinner, and called Karl into his study afterwards.   
  
"You are turning into a thin, sickly, fearful boy. All the makings of a coward, son," he said. Karl looked up, stung. His father's thick beard and eyebrows hid any emotion on his face, and Karl tried not to shrink back from such a severe visage.   
  
"Face your fears. If you can face your fears then they cannot master you." His father cracked a smile through his beard and reached out to rumple Karl's hair. Karl ducked instinctively, knowing that the touch of his father's wedding band would speak of his infidelities in a language of flesh Karl could not yet understand. His father frowned at this and cuffed him instead. "Face them," he growled.   
  
_Face them_ . . . yes, in time he would face them all. Karl analyzed which of these unwelcome visions frightening him the most, and yes, it was the visions of death. So he must touch dead things--feel their pain and their end until it ceased to matter to him. In the forest near his family's home he found dead squirrels, dead insects, even once a dead wolf, and he felt its final sorrow as it gave up the life of the hunter. He felt a hundred animal deaths until he could predict the catch of faltering breath, the feeling of blood slowing, of the heartbeat stopping.   
  
"That boy is too knowing," Karl overheard his mother say one evening as he went upstairs to bed.   
  
"He is very smart for his age. Very smart," said his father.   
  
"I don't mean that," she replied. "It looks like he knows . . . I don't know--secrets. Things he shouldn't."   
  
"Should I ask him?" His mother sighed and shook her head.   
  
"He is so strange. I don't think that would help."   
  
Karl smiled. Secrets, yes, he knew secrets. He knew of his father's mistress, his teachers' affairs, and deeper secrets still, the dark secrets of life and death.   
  
One day a death his hands felt ceased to surprise him--pain, loss, nothingness of dead flesh--these sensations told him nothing new. He needed some new fear to face, and went into the woods to find it.   
  
He was fast with his pocketknife and skewered a squirrel as it came to chew on the bread he left as bait. It yelped in pain as it tried to wriggle away from where his blade impaled its tail. Was that the first moment the Ogdru Jahad spoke to him? He did not hear them then, but he learned later that every drop of blood spilled for pleasure is a message to them--it is not what they crave but it reaches them all the same.   
  
Then, all Karl knew was that this animal was under his power completely, as no other being had ever been. He made its death last a long time. As a living thing it told him nothing; only objects and dead things spoke their secret language to him, but once it died, then it told him of it's pain, read back to him every cut of his knife. Karl felt the frisson of fear again wondering if he could stand this. But he could, and the next time he took a larger animal, and made it hurt more.   
  
[][][]   
  
Things to do, Kroenen reminded himself. He put back on his metal hand. Replacing a flesh and blood hand with a metal one had been his only true victory against his talent. A metal hand could tell him nothing--movement but none of those intrusive flashes. Had he ever known a moment when he would not have given anything to rid himself of his gift?   
  
After the family cat perished under his knife, yes, that was when the seven elder gods had made their presence known. Under the map of death woven in the cat's matted fur was their promise: if he would be their servant, they would take this gift, this psychometry from him. But he must prove his loyalty: no mere animal, a dumb, unthinking thing, but a human must die under his knife--out here in the forest where he had spilled so much blood before.   
  
Karl Kroenen, twelve years old, cried then for the last time, but the message from the gods was implacable. And even as he sat on the mossy ground and pitied himself, he felt a growing temptation. Yes, that was the next step in facing his fear. He dried his eyes on his sleeve, and made his plans.   
  
The widow Becker had an idiot son and the rumors ran that her husband had killed himself in grief. Such children should not be allowed to live, Karl's father had said. Karl lured the child from it's home with sweets abstracted from his mother's kitchen. He held the boy's sticky hand in his own as they walked to the forest. He bound the boy's mouth with his handkerchief and cut the boy's throat with his pocketknife. The blood splattered on his hands, and he felt the boys last confused moments in it, and tasted his fear. He felt no remorse, no sorrow, only wished he had found a worthier sacrifice.   
  
This time the Elder Gods' message was not subtle; darkness fell and they took his mind entirely for a time, filling him with magic and memories of dark things that had not yet occurred. When Karl returned to himself he knew his great destiny: to bring the Ogdru Jahad back to earth, to make of earth a home for them and their followers, a hell, a paradise for the cruel.   
  
"Wait," he cried out, as he felt their presence leaving him. "What about your promise?"   
  
The one that had the ability to speak in human languages seemed to pause and regard him. "Cover yourself from head to foot, wear a mask, wear gloves, and this talent will not trouble you." Karl felt a hint of mirth--the creatures were laughing at him. Then they withdrew completely.   
  
"You promised!" he screamed into the empty woods. _A child's protest_, some dry voice in his mind noted. The body at his feet was gone, nothing of it remained besides Karl's bloody handkerchief.   
  
[][][]   
  
Kroenen took the gods' advice, of course, in this as in so many other things. He gravitated toward the fencing studios where he could wear his gear and mask and be completely covered. In the Great War his gas mask became his constant companion, but now in this underground lab he stood naked to the impressions of every object in the room.   
  
His clothes, when he put them back on, whispered more of this fish-man, and Kroenen realized this being also possessed the gift of psychometry, but it he had learned to live with it. This creature did not live in fear, but also had not killed, much. Suddenly Kroenen felt a violent wash of hatred in his mind and wanted to kill this creature whose path had not been fixed toward Hell at such a young age. Every bargain with his gods had been empty: even the promise of a great destiny had been usurped by this Rasputin.   
  
But no, Kroenen had a job to do, another killing; time to exercise his oldest skill yet again. He could still feel Professor Broom's touch on his clothes, but that would fade, and soon the man would be dead. His empty bargains bound him still. Kroenen grasped his swords in his gloved and metal hands. No new language here. Quiet as a grave he went to his master.   
  



End file.
